Sunday, September 18, 2011

I Haz a Tragic

This illustration of the "Four Laws Ecology", which is really just a canon of evolution, can be found here:

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.

3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system.”

4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance; for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

All life on Earth is connected by carbon. The burning of carbon – carbon that has been sequestered over millennia by the accumulation of animal-based petroleum and plant-based coal – over the course of a few hundreds of years has proven not to be a “free lunch”. The relentless rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not going to stop and the relentless rise in temperature will continue. The only answer – which we resist, deny, refuse and are unwilling to accept – is that we must stop burning ALL fossil fuels. Not a reduction and not less. All. The Burning Age is over. And just as the Stone Age ended before they ran out of stones, so the Burning Age must end before we run out of fossil fuels.

...a key excerpt is this quote from Dr. Gideon Polya: "pollutants from gas leakage and gas burning pose a chemical risk to residents, agriculture and the environment."

It is reasonable to ask, what exactly the hell does that mean? (Here is the answer - notice any of this occurring around you? This encapsulates the essence of the Wit's End blog, as expounded in the Basic Premise at the top of the page, with the rather profound question - Do you think you can survive without trees and plants?):

Nitrogen oxides can seriously injure vegetation, bleaching or killing plant tissue, causing leaf fall and reducing growth rate. Ozone pollution damages photosynthesis by plants. NOx air pollution contributes to acidifying nitrate deposition (with fish kills and reduction in plant growth), causes excess soil nitrification in ecosystems (with damage to vegetation, loss of biodiversity, increased GHG pollution) and is regarded not just as a threat to agriculture and forestry but also to as a major threat to national parks and wilderness areas.